Finding The Stink

12.07.2008

Ever since we were dating he had been holding on to this circular piece of, well, I am not quite sure what it is, but he claims it is a meteorite, I claim bullshit. Quite literally to. It looks like a giant piece of fecal matter. I know that isn't glamorous to say that, but really that is what it looks like. So, in an effort to be fair, I am going to give you my husbands argument for why he believes he owns something more rare than gold, maybe he can convince you guys because his claims fall on deaf ears with me.

His story:He was out in the desert riding dirt bikes with his family, by the Salton Sea. His bike broke down and as his uncle and father tried to fix it, he was left to wander the desert. Which is where he happened upon his lovely specimen. It caught his eye because of the shape, and thankfully it was resting on top of a rock (because, you know, meteorites are thoughtful upon impact and like to make it easy for you to find them) and the rest is history!

My story:I don't need a story, I have pictures on my side, and here they are. LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO THE MOST MAGNIFICANT PIECE OF SPACE POO EVER!

Top

Bottom

Side

Relative size (Yes I know I have stubby fingers, thanks for bringing it up. Jerk.)

12.03.2008

I have been doing nothing but cooking for the past two days. What have I been up to in the kitchen? Well......

I had to remake those caramel things the cat decided to ruin yesterday, which, funny thing, turns out a candy thermometer is necessary for making candy, go figure. So, those delicious sounding caramel things? Yeah, they were pretty much ruined, the taste was good, but the caramel was over cooked and a little more tough than pretty much anyone in their right mind would want. Another thing I learned? If you dip anything in chocolate, you can make it look pretty.

Case in point.

I am thinking about doing the same thing to my face the next time makeup isn't working. I get the feeling people would like me better. In reality I might just attract bitchy women, but who doesn't like those?

The other things made in my kitchen over the past two days were not as exciting (relative, excitement is relative here.) as cat paw caramel. Just some butterscotch oatmeal cookies, chocolate dipped pretzels and peanut clusters. I am testing them out for small Christmas gifts.

SO WATCH OUT FAMILY. YOU MAY BE GETTING.....Never mind, you will just have to wait and see.

Oh! I need you to do something for me. First, I need you to take all your desktop icons and move them to the left. I can wait.....

Alright, good job, now I need you to click here. Now, you see that picture, right click on it, and choose to "set as desktop background". Trust me, you will thank me later. That tounge can brighten up your darkest day. I promise you. It cures cancer and feeds the homeless.

12.02.2008

Alright, we have already established the fact that I am adorable*. This adorableness carries over to all aspects of my life. I am sorry, but it is true. Sometimes this adorableness even makes me do things that no sane human would do on a whim. For example, today I got the urge to make chocolate dipped caramallows. A nice labor intensive project for Tuesday. This entails, a layer of handmade caramel, then handmade marshmallow, then another layer of the caramel, letting it sit for 8 hours and hand dipping them in chocolate.

So, I finish one layer of caramel, I spread it in the pan, and after two attempts I get the marshmallow mixture right, I spread it on top of the caramel layer and just as I am finishing....

....I see it. A German Shepard, trying to cross the road. He almost gets hit by a car so I venture out to check his tag in an attempt to return him to his home and, as I make friends with the dog and start to check for a tag (there was none), I hear it.

IT!

Our fat cat freaking stepped in my caramel/marshmallow mixture, I knew it before I even got back inside. Then, when I do get inside, I see it.

IT!

There are marshmallow paw prints EVERYWHERE, no really, they are seriously everywhere. On the window, on the table, on the chairs, in the carpet. WHAT. THE. HELL? Have you ever tried giving a cat covered in marshmallow a bath? HAVE YOU?!? I am pretty sure it is as close to hell as you can get with out actually taking the elevator down. Ugh, I am scarred for life. At least the paw prints came up with a little bit of elbow grease.

Gah! I have to go, I have more caramel to make, but for your viewing pleasure, here is the culprit, when she is pretending not to be the devil.

11.24.2008

Alright, I have a couple of really random things to share, so stick with me please.

Randomocity #1

You know who you are, I don't. You don't need to fess up, but to the person who hopped onto the computer and eagerly typed in the words "Monster eats naked girl" into Google, in hopes of....well....lets be honest, god only knows what. I am not going to test it out, nothing good can come of it.

Anyways, I am sorry that you were directed to my blog. It must have been a huge disappointment as the only monsters in my life are the socks that come off my filthy construction workers feet. They basically walk themselves to the washing machine. Scary, no?

Randomocity #2

For those of you who don't know me personally and just stumbled across my blog, thank your lucky stars. Thank them because, if you did know me personally you would be pulled into my orbit of adorableness, and you wouldn't be able to escape. Sorry, it's a proven fact. I would have you trapped with my charm, and if you have not taken your meds, or you have had a few drinks, you may even be pulled in with my wit. Okay, maybe that was just me being hopeful. A gal can dream.

Proof:This year with the whole world being broke (Minus any and all CEO's of corporations who have been bailed out) my immediate family has decided to pull names out of a hat to determine who we are buying gifts for. With 5 siblings, two parents, and a niece who you can't resit buying the world for, the holidays can be pricey, and that is just my side of the family. I offered to be in charge of putting people's names on cards for drawing. But my adorableness over powered all things mundane and boring and I ended up making these....

They are white 3 X 3 envelopes, with the same sized black cards on the inside. I raided the scrapbooking aisle of my local jo-anns and came out with green ribbon, Swarovski crystals and little glue on snowflakes.

You are spared all the details as I don't have the cards done yet. Apparently working with tweezers, toothpicks loaded with glue and millimeter sized crystals isn't the fastest process.

11.21.2008

Oh, no no no. Not me, no. Sorry, hope I didn't suck you in with an overly exciting title just to bludgeon you over the head with mundane details about things only a select few care about, cause, you know, that would be awful.......or something like that. Oh well, to late now you are sucked in. Pull up a chair and deal with it.

The near death experience was not experienced by me, but by our fungia.

For reference, this is a fungia.

The fleshy neon orange membrane had torn a little on the fungia a number of weeks ago so we had moved it out of the position shown ever so subtly above. We put it in a corner of the tank so the flow would not make the tear worse, because corals don't really appreciate band aids. While in the corner a rouge yuma

For refrence, a yuma.Okay, so where were? Oh yeah, so the rouge yuma posted above tumbled over to our fungia. And it stung the fungia. IT FREAKING STUNG IT. So not only does it have a tear in it's poor little membrane, but it is stung also! A-hole rouge yuma. So then the fungia does this cute little thing where it looks like someone took a match to it.

Not so great, right? Well, it looks bad but there is still membrane, no skeleton is exposed, it was still taking in water and it stayed like this for a few days. I should have stopped freaking out, right?

Wrong! Thismarked the onset of it's decline in health. The white is the corals skeleton, it was starting to bleach out. Not good, and it only got worse from there, the whole half of the fungia proceeded to bleach out, not fully, but pretty close. It was dying, quickly and there was nothing we could do about it. We were beyond devastated, but until you know how many hours and weekends were spent trying to find a creature as beautiful, brilliant and orange as that fungia......you would be devastated as well. Oh, don't look at me like that, YOU WOULD. Bite me.

A couple weeks go by, we go to babysit the girls and we are gone for the weekend. After we wander beaten and bruised back into our house after 72 hours with 2 girls under 5 and we were greeted by a big, more healthy than it used to be, rebounding, fungia. The best welcome home present EVER.

Grab a tissue for this part ladies and gentlefolk

That was two weeks ago and it has continued to improve, it has been a slow go process, but it is BACK. Best things about these creatures?

Random Opinion: Best thing about these creatures? The way they puff up and open their mouths to eat. Oh, don't act surprised that we have two of these things, I just wrote a mouthful about ONE, of course we have more than that. That is it though, I promise.

10.25.2008

I am going to be honest. We be broke. Okay, maybe not broke but my filthy construction worker of husband and I are pretty much just scraping by living on only his paycheck. Extra cash is a thing of the past for us (or at least until I have a new job). Not only are we just scraping by, work for Gray has been a bit sketchy. Because the construction industry is directly tied to the economy, a couple of people have had to cancel jobs or have been unable to finish jobs and, like I said, things have been a bit sketchy.

So since I have been home, Gray has had a considerable amount of time off as well, which makes things even worse for us financially (go with me for a second, this isn't a sob story, trust me).

We don't eat out anymore, good beer is a luxury not common place. $20 at the movie theater isn't happening. Bills are paid easily of course, it is just the extras that are lacking.

and I can't say that the ducks care, nor do we. It has given us a lot of time to just hang out and be with each other and gives us time to not live life by proxy. Yesterday was one of the best Monday's I have had in years.

We were babysitting my niece while my sister was in L.A. for work and we took her to feed her obsession, literally. She has a thing for ducks that quack. Thankfully, the ducks had quite a bit to say about the quarter loaf of organic multi grain bread she was feeding them.Please note Gray's face as his favorite mallard is scared away by our niece's advances. Gray has a thing for mallards.

Then we went for a sunset hike before dinnerto a sculpture garden, which was one of the last major international art projects done by Niki De Saint Phalle.Everyone loves the "garden" and it is so random that it is in our town. Not the place I would picture such an amazing work of art.and if you haven't noticed, being able to spend the quality time with my family, the people most important to me in life, has given me time to take just a few pictures of my favorite subject. she is such a beautiful ham.

10.15.2008

Picture frames can be sooooo expensive and if you are like me and you have tons of pictures hanging around and you can't afford a mass amount of picture frames it might just make you turn to your creative side to come up with something...ANYTHING..to get those pictures out of the cabinet and on to the walls.

So the filthy construction worker of a husband and I came up with this low cost idea.

All we did was take two rows of cut-at-home-depot flexible wire, string them through eyelets screwed into the wall and crimp them in place and then used a small clip to clip all the pictures on to the wire. It was super easy, no super special tools were required and you really should go give it a try!